Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls Review

Long Live the Loot

As someone who was there, Hot Pockets in hand for all the midnight server issues, and other heartbreaks of Diablo 3’s PC launch, it’s difficult to imagine a larger turnaround than Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. Not only has the game it’s built upon been markedly improved by the recent Loot 2.0 patch, but the excellent new content in this expansion is exactly in line with what I wanted for the series. Its world is darker and more dangerous-feeling, its bestiary more varied, and its brilliant new adventure mode gives Reaper of Souls the sense of long-lasting reward that Diablo 3 sorely lacked.

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While the saturated colors and occasional rainbows that punctuated Diablo 3’s rendition of Sanctuary were pretty to look at, Reaper of Souls tosses all of it aside and splashes the canvas with charcoal shades, and deliciously dreary landscapes that harken back to the Diablo of old.

The streets of Westmarch, where the new Act 5 kicks off, are bleak, and filled with scripted events and side-quests that effectively set a tone of hopelessness. Corpses are piled high in cathedrals, civilians run futilely through the streets before being possessed by evil spirits, and civil unrest stirs as it becomes clear that Westmarch’s King is unfit to protect his people. The tritely written plot doesn’t successfully carry these ideas for long, but the atmosphere remains thick to the end, resulting in a world that feels imperiled, and more in need of a hero than the first four acts.

Despite staying on the darker end of the spectrum, Reaper of Souls shows an impressive level of diversity in both its locales and monster designs. Only one quick encounter borrows art from Diablo 3, so the rest of the five-ish hour-long campaign is flush with exciting new sights to see and ever more impressive demons to smite. In one single act, Reaper of Souls exhibits almost as much variety as the entirety of Diablo 3 before it.

The new content in Reaper of Souls really helps give Diablo 3 a longer tail than it previously enjoyed. One of the biggest factors is the new Crusader class, which ably fills the role of Diablo 2’s Paladin. They hit with holy authority, but they also sport an array of defensive, and support abilities that can be useful when playing with friends. Particularly when equipped with a massive shield in one hand and a normally two-handed weapon in the other, Crusaders exhibit a presence and physicality that effectively sets them apart from the other classes, who have new active and passive skills to pick up on the way to the new level cap of 70. You’d be surprised how much that one extra passive slot opens up build possibilities.

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Back in town, the Mystic artisan can transmogrify your gear to give it a more cohesive overall look, and with enchantments, you can reroll a single modifier on a piece of gear until you get what you need, for a price. Enchanting is handled really intelligently, allowing you to see what the possible outcomes are, and letting you either choose one of two new results, or stick with what you originally had. It leaves just enough to chance to feel exciting when you get that perfect roll, but controlled enough that I never felt cheated when things didn’t work out.

But the crown jewel here is undoubtedly the new Adventure mode, which gives you unrestricted access to every waypoint across all five acts. Random side missions called bounties litter the map, offering progressively greater rewards as you go. Complete enough, and you’ll earn items that grant you passage into a Nephalem Rift. These randomly-generated dungeons of varying size are absolutely teeming with mobs pulled from every corner of the game map, making for some the most intense, varied battles I’ve ever fought in an action RPG.

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Different tilesets and environmental effects are anarchically tossed together too, turning each rift into a freshly insane fever-dream. Slay the boss at the end, and you’ll be treated to a huge lootsplosion that almost always includes a legendary. Essentially, Blizzard has created a framework that handsomely rewards us for doing exactly what we want to do after completing the story anyway: log on, do runs, get paid, and log out. Brilliant.

Each of these new elements benefits from the many system changes Diablo 3 has seen in recent months. Though you don’t need to buy Reaper of Souls to experience the joys of Loot 2.0, the revamped Paragon system, or the end of the auction houses, it all adds up to a much greater sense of choice and ownership over how your character looks and plays despite the lingering over-simplicity of the stat system beneath it all. Modifiers that buff specific skills roll frequently, finally making it feasible to gear around specific skill builds. Legendaries drop more often too, and being able to use enchanting to swap useless stats for more relevant ones means you’ll be more likely to use what you find, and keep grinding to find more.

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Verdict

With Reaper of Souls, and the recent round of content patches, Blizzard has transformed Diablo 3 into something far more akin to what long-time fans like me wanted all along. It still requires that annoying always-online connection (which has behaved itself), but it’s more sinister in tone, more rewarding to play, and more maddeningly addictive than it’s ever been. I’m looking forward to many more hours in search of that perfect legendary drop.